Hashimoto on Terraform and Consul

In this infoq talk, Mitchell Hashimoto gives an overview of Terraform and Consul: what they actually do, and how you might use them to solve specific problems. The best thing about this talk is the chance to see how Hashimoto envisions some of these problems that are common to almost all large scale distributed software systems, and how his vision shapes the tools that come out of Hashicorp.

Many great points made in this talk, but if you were to pull away one key point form this talk, it’d be this: containers are probably here to stay, but they aren’t the entire story when it comes to running distributed systems. In the midst of the overwhelming (and justified) hype surrounding Docker and its burgeoning software ecosystem, it’s important to note that a lot of problems in the datacenter are orthogonal to containers and the problems they aim to solve.

While containers do solve a lot of problems, and people are quick to adopt them because of their advantages, we all realize very quickly that their are a lot of other pieces to this puzzle that containers just don’t address at all